


Three of Us

by LaVieEnRose



Series: The One Where Justin Loses His Hearing [115]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Angst, Asthma, Deaf Character, Epilepsy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21735274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVieEnRose/pseuds/LaVieEnRose
Summary: Brian and Justin have a bad night. Evan's there.
Relationships: Brian Kinney (Queer as Folk)/Other(s), Brian Kinney/Justin Taylor (Queer as Folk), Justin Taylor (Queer as Folk)/Other(s)
Series: The One Where Justin Loses His Hearing [115]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1026162
Comments: 41
Kudos: 130





	Three of Us

It started out really subtle. Justin was quiet when Brian and I got home from work, and we ordered in because he didn't feel like cooking, but...sometimes Justin is quiet and doesn't feel like cooking. Doesn't always mean something. He went to their room to lie down after dinner, and Brian said he'd had a bunch of small seizures the night before so he was probably worn out from that. **His hand was completely frozen when he woke up this morning,** he said, while we cleaned up after dinner. **I had to bend his fingers back.**

“Ouch.”

**Yeah, not fun.**

We'd had a long day too, back-to-back client meetings, so we wanted to go out and blow off some steam, so we left a note for Justin and took the train into the city. I couldn't roll or even drink anymore with the kidney shit, and if Brian had anything other than a shot or two at the beginning of the night I didn't notice. We danced together for a while before I split off with some tall blonde and and Brian disappeared into the back room. Brian came out eventually and told me with a two-finger wave that it was time to go, and we compared notes on the train and I twirled around one of the subway poles while he sat and smirked at me, and he pulled me close when I sat back down. 

We were laughing about this horrible dancer we'd seen at the club when we opened the front door to the house, and Justin was standing in the living room with no color in his face.

He looked scared as hell, and he had that lost look in his eyes he gets before or after a seizure, so at first I thought that was what was going on, but Brian signed **wheezing** as he crossed over to him and then, yeah, I saw the way Justin's shoulders were heaving and how the skin at the base of his neck pulled in when he breathed. 

I hate that someone has to tell me. I don't wish I could hear very often, but I really, really wish I could hear Justin's breathing. 

Brian sat Justin down on the couch and then started to head to the bedroom, but I said, **No, I'll get it,** and Brian nodded and sat down next to Justin, leaning in to him and asking him small questions, how long this had been going on, if he needed a hospital. Justin struggled and covered his face with his hands.

I bought the nebulizer out and set up a treatment as quickly as I could, but Justin had clearly already just used it so it needed to be rinsed out and re-set and my hands were shaking and I kept dropping pieces. I should have just let Brian do it, but he was totally focused on Justin now, flattening one hand over his chest, his face creased into an expression I couldn't identify quite yet. 

Finally I had the mouthpiece ready and I handed it to Justin, who sucked on it like he was drowning because I guess in a way he was. I sat on the floor with my chin on his knee, and I felt Brian's hand come down on my shoulder and give it a quick squeeze. Justin took my hand, and he was shaking.

**Did anything cause this?** Brian asked him.

Justin shook his head and signed, **Just happened,** one-handed.

**God, asthma fucking sucks,** Brian said, and Justin nodded hard.

We stayed like that for a long time, just watching Justin try to breathe as it very, very slowly got better. Brian would wince every once in a while when Justin pulled in a breath, and that's when I identified the look on his face. It was sympathy, which probably doesn't sound that noteworthy, except that Brian really, really rarely seems to feel bad for Justin. Or anyone, for that matter, but especially for Justin. 

The nebulizer shut off, and Justin leaned back on the couch, running his hands through his sweaty hair. Brian took the mouthpiece from him and said, **Let me hear,** and Justin breathed in and out slowly. **Better,** Brian said. **Let's grab a Benadryl and put you on oxygen. Think we can get out of hauling you to the hospital, at least.**

Justin nodded and flopped down on his side, curling his knees up to his chest to cough, and Brian squeezed his hand and gave it a quick kiss before he headed to the kitchen.

**You want some tea?** I asked Justin, and he nodded and reached out to me, and I stayed close to him for a minute, playing with his hair and letting him push and pull at my shirt. He gets really antsy for asthma attacks.

When he let me go I went into the kitchen after Brian, who was taking an awfully long time to shake out a Benadryl and haul out the oxygen tank. He was leaning over with his hands planted on the counter and his head down.

“Brian,” I said, and he snapped his head up.

He tried a smirk. **Someday you're going to teach Justin to say Rs and my heart's going to break.**

“Are you okay?”

**Fine.** He reached up to the medicine cabinet and got out the Benadryl, and Justin's other night meds. “Sick, sick, sick,” he said, probably just to himself.

“Yeah.”

**You should go to bed. It's late.**

“I'm pretty awake now.”

**Do you want to take him tonight?** he said without looking at me.

He's usually really clingy after Justin's asthma attacks. They scare Brian in a way seizures don't.

“It's okay,” I said.

**No, take him.** He looked up at me. **Please?**

I can count on one hand the number of times Brian has said please to me.

**Sure,** I said.

We got Justin his meds and had him sit on oxygen for about half an hour, and once he started to fall asleep Brian picked him up and carried him down to the basement while I brought the oxygen tank. If Justin thought it was weird that he was sleeping down here with me tonight, he was too tired to say anything about it, and Brian kissed his face a few times before he went upstairs, squeezing my hand on his way out of the room.

Justin slept soundly, curled up really small, his brow a little furrowed and his arms wrapped around himself. You'd probably think he was having a nightmare, if you didn't know him well, but that actually means he isn't; when he sleeps like that he's comforting himself. It means he's handling everything okay.

And I was just...awake, hour after hour, watching the rafters criss-crossing my ceiling in the dim light bleeding in through my window. It was two last time I'd looked at the clock, had to be almost two-thirty now, and I had work in the morning. I should have been sleep.

I kept noticing the rafters move a little, dip slightly, bend, let go, as someone walked around upstairs.

He should have been asleep too.

I kissed Justin's cheek and climbed carefully out of bed and went up the stairs. Brian was sitting on the couch, the lights low and a glass of whiskey in his hand. There was a variety of crap around him—files, mostly, stuff like that.

**You guys okay, Sunshine?** he signed without raising his head.

“Yes, dear.”

He laughed a little, still reading. **I thought you got up those stairs pretty quick for Justin. Everything okay?**

“Yeah.”

He moved stuff off the couch next to him, and I sat down and pulled the throw onto my lap. He drained his glass, his head tilted back.

“You look tired,” I said.

He reached to the coffee table to set the glass down. “Yeah, I am.” 

“Maybe sleep.”

**Why are you up?**

I shrugged.

**Yeah, me too.**

“What are you doing?”

He held up the file in his hands. **Justin made some changes to his will, wanted me to take a look at it before it goes to our lawyer.**

I nodded.

**I can get Emily to interpret it so you can give it a look too,** he said, because we both knew I wouldn't understand all that legal language if I tried to read it. 

“Okay.”

He settled back in to the paperwork with a sigh, and I just sat and watched him for a while. His beard was a couple days grown out. Brian Kinney could never have real bags under his eyes, but they were a little puffy. I wondered if the will sounded like a lawyer, or if it sounded like Justin. If Brian could hear Justin's voice listing what he'd want to happen if he died.

“Why is he changing it?” I asked Brian, when I couldn't not anymore. “Is something wrong?”

He shook his head a little. **Just adding you.**

Oh. “I should make one,” I realized.

**Nothing's going to happen to you,** he signed without looking up. 

I rested my head against the back of the couch.

After a minute Brian reached to the coffee table for his glass before he remembered it was empty. “Damn.”

“I've got it,” I said, but when I stood up and picked it up he tugged me over by the hem of my shirt—Justin's shirt—and kissed me, lingering a little and clinging to the hair on the back of my neck. Like he didn't want to be alone, even for the minute it would take me to cross to the kitchen.

Brian only kisses me when he's looking for comfort.

I kissed his forehead firmly, like I was saying something, and he let me go. 

I filled his glass back up with whiskey and snuck a sip on my way back to the couch. Brian didn't reach for it right away when I sat back down, but after a minute he stood up abruptly and fished around on the cluttered bookshelf. He came back to me with a small storage box and handed it to me. **Something to do,** he signed, small.

I took the lid off the box. Inside was a messy collection of photos. I recognized a few of them—one Emily took of me and Brian and Justin cracking up in the kitchen of the beach house, and one of the two of them together at our coworker's wedding, gorgeous in their silver suits, Brian's hand on Justin's waist. But a lot of them were older, before I met them. Before they even came to New York. Before Justin lost his hearing, judging by this one of him with earbuds in, head tilted up to a building I didn't recognize.

I looked up at Brian, but he'd already turned back to the will. 

So I started looking through the pictures. Halfway through a little batch of their trip to Italy I noticed some of them had writing on the back. Usually it was just a date, but a few had a word or two, mostly Brian's handwriting, a few Justin's. Uffizi. That boring party. Molly's graduation. One of Justin when he was probably about twenty-five: one week before.

All of them were of Justin.

It was kind of surprising and kind of not, at the same time. I knew Brian liked taking pictures, and I knew Brian liked not throwing things away, and obviously I knew Brian liked Justin, but somehow the fact that all these pictures were hanging out in a box in plain view all this time was really weird to me. It seemed like the kind of thing Brian would have tucked away privately, but maybe that would have meant admitting they were something significant. 

Or maybe he really didn't mind if people found them.

You never really know, with Brian.

He turned a page in the will and circled something with his pen and I kept going through the photos for a while. There were a bunch of Justin and Janie right after she was born. A sweet one of Justin and his mom. Justin making a face at the camera and Michael kissing his cheek. 

A ton of hospital ones, because Brian takes a picture or two of Justin most times he's there. **We're not trying to forget this,** he said to me once, when I asked him why. **It's not traumatic. It's his life.** Justin making faces at the camera in hospital gowns, Justin curled up in the bed asleep, Justin drugged to the gills and smiling. 

He looked really young in one, and the hospital didn't look familiar. I checked the date on the back; May 2001. Oh.

I saw Brian move out of the corner of my eye, and I looked up to him pinching the bridge of his nose. “God, I can't do this tonight,” he said. He's so easy to lipread. Even when he's not talking to me.

“So don't,” I said. “It's okay.”

**It's not okay,** he said, and then he turned to me, something like desperation in his eyes. **This is how it's going to happen someday.**

**No.**

**Yes,** he insisted. **One day he's going to try to breathe and he won't be able to and that will be it. Someday he's going to try and it just won't work.**

“That's a long time from now,” I said.

**He's going to be so scared,** Brian said, and he swallowed and swallowed. **I've spent so much time thinking about what I would fucking feel like when he died, what it would feel like to not have him here. But I just fucking realized that he's going to _hate_ dying. That's the last thing he's going to feel, he's going to be fucking terrified, and there won't be anything I can do. He's going to hate it.**

“Shut up.” I took Brian's face in my hands and looked at him hard. “Shut up shut up shut up. You're freaking out because you're reading his will. This is all _ages_ from now. Justin is fine. He's sleeping.”

“God,” Brian said. “Fuck,” and I moved to his lap and kissed the tears off his cheeks, over and over and over again. He dug his fingers into my back and we just held on for a while, me and Brian and all these pictures of Justin.

Eventually he pulled back a little, head bowed. **He's coughing.**

**Okay. We'll go down in a minute.**

Brian looked at me for a second, then grabbed me impulsively and hugged me close, and after a second of that he pushed me away from him so I could see his lips. “Don't,” he said.

“I won't.”

“Go anywhere.”

“I won't, Brian.”

“If he—” 

“I won't leave you alone.”

Brian nodded and swallowed, and swallowed.

**We are making it out of today alive,** I said to him.

He took a deep breath. **We are making it out of today alive. He needs oxygen.**

**Okay. Come on.**

We left the will and the photos and the whiskey where they were—Justin would find them the next day, and give us both shit about being drama queens, which we would vehemently deny—and went down to the basement. I got the oxygen mask back over Justin's face and Brian curled up behind him, burying his nose in the back of Justin's neck and pulling me down to the bed with them.

And we stayed like that for a long time, the three of us.

**Author's Note:**

> I kinda want to do something with Emily next I think if y'all have any ideas for her!


End file.
